#retired and retrained

[anaverage-shannon]

I will forever post standardbreds🖤

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[celestialprincesse]

Thinking about Simon going to his local animal shelter after retirement because his therapist recommended he get a pet in order to keep himself busy, have a reason to get up in the mornings and just overall have some company.

Not only does he end up going home with a dog, but also one of the cute shelter volunteers who tried desperately to get him to take home some (all) of the pets who've been in there the longest.

When they do inevitably move in together, she tries (and fails) to sneakily bring home as many of the scraggly little drop offs she can because they're so cute and sweet and no one else even passes them a second glance.

They turn into that one slightly odd couple with like ten dogs and six cats, and they're always up at weird hours to feed the latest fragile little foster baby they've somehow been put in charge of looking after.

He ends up loving all the animals, how rewarding it is to see them grow, and the bittersweet moments when they finally find their forever homes.

He loves it so much, in fact, that he decides to open a K9 rehabilitation program, combining his military expertise and her veterinary knowledge and, of course, their shared love of animals.

Together, they take former working animals, retraining them to be safely and comfortably reintegrated back into day-to-day life before pairing them with their forever families (who, unsurprisingly, tend to be veterans in a similar situation to Simon's).

All of the guys he served with visit his place, and very few of them leave without a leash in their hand and a new friend at their heels.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The new globalism is global labor

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

Depending on how you look at it, I either grew up in the periphery of the labor movement, or atop it, or surrounded by it. For a kid, labor issues don't really hold a lot of urgency – in places with mature labor movements, kids don't really have jobs, and the part-time jobs I had as a kid (paper route, cleaning a dance studio) were pretty benign.

Ironically, one of the reasons that labor issues barely registered for me as a kid was that my parents were in great, strong unions: Ontario teachers' unions, which protected teachers from exploitative working conditions and from retaliation when they advocated for their students, striking for better schools as well as better working conditions.

Ontario teachers' unions were strong enough that they could take the lead on workplace organization, to the benefit of teachers at every part of their careers, as well as students and the system as a whole. Back in the early 1980s, Ontario schools faced a demographic crisis. After years of declining enrollment, the number of students entering the system was rapidly increasing.

That meant that each level of the system – primary, junior, secondary – was about to go through a whipsaw, in which low numbers of students would be followed by large numbers. For a unionized education workforce, this presented a crisis: normally, a severe contraction in student numbers would trigger layoffs, on a last-in, first-out basis. That meant that layoffs loomed for junior teachers, who would almost certainly end up retraining for another career. When student numbers picked up again, those teachers wouldn't be in the workforce anymore, and worse, a lot of the senior teachers who got priority during layoffs would be retiring, magnifying the crisis.

The teachers' unions were strong, and they cared about students and teachers, both those at the start of their careers and those who'd given many years of service. They came up with an amazing solution: "self-funded sabbaticals." Teachers with a set number of years of seniority could choose to take four years at 80% salary, and get a fifth year off at 80% salary (actually, they could take their year off any time from the third year on).

This allowed Ontario to increase its workforce by about 20%, for free. Senior teachers got a year off to spend with their families, or on continuing education, or for travel. Junior teachers' jobs were protected. Students coming into the system had adequate classroom staff, in a mix of both senior and junior teachers.

This worked great for everyone, including my family. My parents both took their four-over-five year in 1983/84. They rented out our house for six months, charging enough to cover the mortgage. We flew to London, took a ferry to France, and leased a little sedan. For the next six months, we drove around Europe, visiting fourteen countries while my parents homeschooled us on the long highway stretches and in laundromats. We stayed in youth hostels and took a train to Leningrad to visit my family there. We saw Christmas Midnight Mass at the Vatican and walked around the Parthenon. We saw Guernica at the Prado. We visited a computer lab in Paris and I learned to program Logo in French. We hung out with my parents' teacher pals who were civilian educators at a Canadian Forces Base in Baden-Baden. I bought an amazing hand-carved chess set in Seville with medieval motifs that sung to my D&D playing heart. It was amazing.

No, really, it was amazing. Unions and the social contract they bargained for transformed my family's life chances. My dad came to Canada as a refugee, the son of a teen mother who'd been deeply traumatized by her civil defense service as a child during the Siege of Leningrad. My mother was the eldest child of a man who, at thirteen, had dropped out of school to support his nine brothers and sisters after the death of his father. My parents grew up to not only own a home, but to be able to take their sons on a latter-day version of the Grand Tour that was once the exclusive province of weak-chinned toffs from the uppermost of crusts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour

My parents were active in labor causes and in their unions, of course, but that was just part of their activist lives. My mother was a leader in the fight for legal abortion rights in Canada:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/8882641733

My dad was active in party politics with the New Democratic Party, and both he and my mother were deeply involved with the fight against nuclear arms proliferation, a major issue in Canada, given our role in supplying radioisotopes to the US, building key components for ICBMs, testing cruise missiles over Labrador, and our participation in NORAD.

Abortion rights and nuclear arms proliferation were my own entry into political activism. When I was 13, I organized a large contingent from my school to march on Queen's Park, the seat of the Provincial Parliament, to demand an end to Ontario's active and critical participation in the hastening of global nuclear conflagration:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/

When I got a little older, I started helping with clinic defense and counterprotests at the Morgentaler Clinic and other sites in Toronto that provided safe access to women's health, including abortions:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/morgentaler-honoured-by-order-of-canada-federal-government-not-involved-1.716775

My teens were a period of deepening involvement in politics. It was hard work, but rewarding and fundamentally hopeful. There, in the shadow of imminent nuclear armageddon, there was a role for me to play, a way to be more than a passive passenger on a runaway train, to participate in the effort to pull the brake lever before we ran over the cliff.

In hindsight, though, I can see that even as my activism intensified, it also got harder. We struggled more to find places to meet, to find phones and computers to use, to find people who could explain how to get a permit for a demonstration or to get legal assistance for comrades in jail after a civil disobedience action.

What I couldn't see at the time was that all of this was provided by organized labor. The labor movement had the halls, the photocopiers, the lawyers, the experience – the infrastructure. Even for campaigns that were directly about labor rights – campaigns for abortion rights, or against nuclear annihilation – the labor movement was the material, tangible base for our activities.

Look, riding a bicycle around all night wheatpasting posters to telephone poles to turn out people for an upcoming demonstration is hard work, but it's much harder if you have to pay for xeroxing at Kinko's rather than getting it for free at the union hall. Worse, the demonstration turnout suffers more because the union phone-trees and newsletters stop bringing out the numbers they once brought out.

This was why the neoliberal project took such savage aim at labor: they understood that a strong labor movement was foundation of antiimperialist, antiracist, antisexist struggles for justice. By dismantling labor, the ruling class kicked the legs out from under all the other fights that mattered.

Every year, it got harder to fight for any kind of better world. We activist kids grew to our twenties and foundered, spending precious hours searching for a room to hold a meeting, leaving us with fewer hours to spend organizing the thing we were meeting for. But gradually, we rebuilt. We started to stand up our own fragile, brittle, nascent structures that stood in for the mature and solid labor foundation that we'd grown up with.

The first time I got an inkling of what was going on came in 1999, with the Battle of Seattle: the mass protests over the WTO. Yes, labor turned out in force for those mass demonstrations, but they weren't its leaders. The militancy, the leadership, and the organization came out of groups that could loosely be called "post-labor" – not in the sense that they no longer believed in labor causes, but in the sense that they were being organized outside of traditional labor.

Labor was in retreat. Five years earlier, organized labor had responded to NAFTA by organizing against Mexican workers, rather than the bosses who wanted to ship jobs to Mexico. It wasn't unusual to see cars in Ontario with CAW bumper stickers alongside xenophobic stickers taking aim at Mexicans, not bosses. Those were the only workers that organized labor saw as competitors for labor rights: this was also the heyday of "two-tier" contracts, which protected benefits for senior workers while leaving their junior comrades exposed to bosses' most sadistic practices, while still expecting junior workers to pay dues to a union that wouldn't protect them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier

Two-tier contracts were the opposite of the solidarity that my parents' teachers' union exhibited in the early 1980s; blaming Mexican workers for automakers' offshoring was the opposite of the solidarity that built transracial and international labor power in the early days of the union movement:

https://unionhall.aflcio.org/bloomington-normal-trades-and-labor-assembly/labor-culture/edge-anarchy-first-class-pullman-strike

As labor withered under a sustained, multi-decades-long assault on workers' rights, other movements started to recapitulate the evolution of early labor, shoring up fragile movements that lacked legal protections, weathering setbacks, and building a "progressive" coalition that encompassed numerous issues. And then that movement started to support a new wave of labor organizing, situating labor issues on a continuum of justice questions, from race to gender to predatory college lending.

Young workers from every sector joined ossified unions with corrupt, sellout leaders and helped engineer their ouster, turning these dying old unions into engines of successful labor militancy:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

In other words, we're in the midst of a reversal of the historic role of labor and other social justice movements. Whereas once labor anchored a large collection of smaller, less unified social movements; today those social movements are helping bring back a weakened and fragmented labor movement.

One of the key organizing questions for today is whether these two movements can continue to co-evolve and, eventually, merge. For example: there can be no successful climate action without climate justice. The least paid workers in America are also the most racially disfavored. The gender pay-gap exists in all labor markets. For labor, integrating social justice questions isn't just morally sound, it's also tactically necessary.

One thing such a fusion can produce is a truly international labor movement. Today, social justice movements are transnational: the successful Irish campaign for abortion rights was closely linked to key abortion rights struggles in Argentina and Poland, and today, abortion rights organizers from all over the world are involved in mailing medication abortion pills to America.

A global labor movement is necessary, and not just to defeat the divide-and-rule tactics of the NAFTA fight. The WTO's legacy is a firmly global capitalism: workers all over the world are fighting the same corporations. The strong unions of one country are threatened by weak labor in other countries where their key corporations seek to shift manufacturing or service delivery. But those same strong unions are able to use their power to help their comrades abroad protect their labor rights, depriving their common adversary of an easily exploited workforce.

A key recent example is Mercedes, part of the Daimler global octopus. Mercedes' home turf is Germany, which boasts some of the strongest autoworker unions in the world. In the USA, Mercedes – like other German auto giants – preferentially manufactures its cars in the South, America's "onshore-offshore" crime havens, where labor laws are both virtually nonexistent and largely unenforced. This allows Mercedes to exploit and endanger a largely Black workforce in a "right to work" territory where unions are nearly impossible to form and sustain.

Mercedes just defeated a hard-fought union drive in Vance, Alabama. In part, this was due to admitted tactical blunders from the UAW, who have recently racked up unprecedented victories in Tennessee and North Carolina:

https://paydayreport.com/uaw-admits-digital-heavy-organizing-committee-light-approach-failed-them-in-alabama-at-mercedes/

But mostly, this was because Mercedes cheated. They flagrantly violated labor law to sabotage the union vote. That's where it gets interesting. German workers have successfully lobbied the German parliament for the Supply Chain Act, an anticorruption law that punishes German companies that violate labor law abroad. That means that even though the UAW just lost their election, they might inflict some serious pain on Mercedes, who face a fine of 2% of their global annual revenue, and a ban on selling cars to the German government:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

This is another way reversal of the post-neoliberal era. Whereas once the US exported its most rapacious corporate practices all over the world, today, global labor stands a chance of exporting workers' rights from weak territories to strong ones.

Here's an American analogy: the US's two most populous states are California and Texas. The policies of these states ripple out over the whole country, and even beyond. When Texas requires textbooks that ban evolution, every pupil in the country is at risk of getting a textbook that embraces Young Earth Creationism. When California enacts strict emission standards, every car in the country gets cleaner tailpipes. The WTO was a Texas-style export: a race to the bottom, all around the world. The moment we're living through now, as global social movements fuse with global labor, are a California-style export, a race to the top.

This is a weird upside to global monopoly capitalism. It's how antitrust regulators all over the world are taking on corporations whose power rivals global superpowers like the USA and China: because they're all fighting the same corporations, they can share tactics and even recycle evidence from one-another's antitrust cases:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/big-tech-eu-drop-dead

Look, the UAW messed up in Alabama. A successful union vote is won before the first ballot is cast. If your ground game isn't strong enough to know the outcome of the vote before the ballot box opens, you need more organizing, not a vote:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

But thanks to global labor – and its enemy, global capitalism – the UAW gets another chance. Global capitalism is rich and powerful, but it has key weaknesses. Its drive to "efficiency" makes it terribly vulnerable, and a disruption anywhere in its supply chain can bring the whole global empire to its knees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule

American workers – especially swing-state workers who swung for Trump and are leaning his way again – overwhelmingly support a pro-labor agenda. They are furious over "price gouging and outrageous corporate profits…wealthy corporate CEOs and billionaires [not] paying what they should in taxes and the top 1% gaming the system":

https://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/_files/ugd/d4d64f_6c3dff0c3da74098b07ed3f086705af2.pdf

They support universal healthcare, and value Medicare and Social Security, and trust the Democrats to manage both better than Republicans will. They support "abortion rights, affordable child care, and even forgiving student loans":

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-20-bidens-working-class-slump/

The problem is that these blue-collar voters are atomized. They no longer meet in union halls – they belong to gun clubs affiliated with the NRA. There are enough people who are a) undecided and b) union members in these swing states to defeat Trump. This is why labor power matters, and why a fusion of American labor and social justice movements matters – and why an international fusion of a labor-social justice coalition is our best hope for a habitable planet and a decent lives for our families.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/20/a-common-foe/#the-multinational-playbook

[ayeforscotland]

Coming from someone whose dad has been in the oil industry his whole life, to quote him: "I'm glad I'm retiring now", as in, before the industry is forcibly collapsed. He's perfectly capable of retraining, but the nature of getting old means, well... he's stuck in his ways. He still thinks it's appalling how many internships there are in the energy industry aimed specifically at fossil fuels, though. They're being churned out like nothing else.

Yeah, it’s definitely not a great time to be getting into the industry. The ‘bite’ is beginning to happen with electric vehicles etc.

Problem is that as these things start to wind down, it won’t be the companies that take responsibility for retraining their employees, so government needs to offer something to them to ease their transition.

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

I don't know if this is something you'll be able to answer, but it's something I've been wondering for decades and I think you have the knowledge necessary for it.

So I used to ride horses for around 10 years, and when I first started to ride when I was around 8, when a horse was being super stuborn and didn't want to move. The riding instructor said it was okay to kick the horses as hard as I could (while I was sitting in the saddle) to get them moving, that they would bearly feel it cause they were so big, and their skin was thicker than ours.

And as a kid I trusted the adult instructor, but as I got older, and the more I interacted with horses and learnt how sensitive they could be to touch, I started to wonder if that was really okay, or if the only reason the horses seemed chill about it was cause they were used to it or something?

oh I just remembered a second thing I was wondering about, that same ranch also had a super old horse, I think he was in his 30s when I stopped going, was allowed to just wander around the ranch once he was retired, which I always sorta wondered if that was okay you know? he never seemed interested in leaving the ranch even tho there was nothing stopping him, and the part where cars could go was extremely small and they never went that fast anyways so I don't see why it'd be a bad thing, but I just couldn't shake the feeling it wasn't okay you know?

(I know these questions aren't about marine animals or even zoo animals, but I hope its okay for me to ask anyways, feel free to ignore if you want obvs)

Hi there! I don't mind horse questions - I used to work with them a lot and used to have my own horse!

I understand that feeling so well - there were so many times where I felt pressured to use excessive force with horses. Even with my own horse, because I was at the mercy of people who I thought knew best.

That's why I left the horse industry to work in the zoo and marine mammal field - so I could learn how to correctly, effectively and ethically apply positive reinforcement based training methods.

The last time I had a riding lesson was about a year ago. I wanted to give it a try again because I missed horses and it had been going fine. But the last time I was there, I left in tears because they put me on a horse that seriously needed to be retrained from the ground - and not be a lesson horse because he clearly hated it. I was not about to bully the horse into submission for the sake of getting my money's worth. I refused to "ride through" this horse's learned behaviour of stopping at arena corners and running my leg into the side of the arena. He wasn't listening to leg aids or rein aids. People had been riding him so inconsistently that he didn't even know what those signals meant anymore.

That's when people often will get out the whips and spurs to escalate those "aids". Because if all you're using is negative reinforcement/positive punishment and the aversive isn't working, you have to make that aversive even more uncomfortable/painful and "make them do it!". That's where things start to get really nasty, that's when conflict behaviours come up like rearing, bucking, bolting.

This animal was stressed, I was frustrated. He wasn't in a state to learn, he needed a break. He needed a chance to relearn those skills and be taught how to enjoy being ridden again. I refused to get into a fight with this horse. That isn't how I train and it won't be how I ride, either.

But horse riding is so heavily aversive based that escalation of aversives is just standard practise in riding schools.

When you were asked to kick harder, you were being asked to escalate the pressure for a horse that probably had become desensitised to softer leg aids. Lesson horses put up with so much incosistency, it makes sense that they get so "dull" to the aids.

There's also the issue of learned helplessness. When animals (and people) are put in a situation that they can't escape from, they give up trying to do so. They just sort of... tune everything out and become dull to any sort of learning process. It's sad because a lot of horses that people say are "bombproof" are just in a state of learned helplessness.

Horses absolutely do feel those kicks and they do not actually have "thick skin". They have thinner skin and even more nerve endings in their skin than we do!

The escalating use of force for "stubborn" horses is a symptom of an outdated industry that's still stuck in eltist tradition and would rather put a piece of twisted wire into a horse's mouth and spurs on rider's boots than re-teach skills from the ground or use positive reinforcement (treats are so taboo with horse people - they way they react, you'd think you'd brought a weapon into the yard and not a bag of carrots lol)

As for the wandering around? It's not ideal, sure. There's a certain amount of complacency in just expecting a free roaming animal not to leave the area. I guess as long as they're not standing in traffic/being a hazard/getting hurt it's okay but definitely not how I would be keeping my animals.

Anyway that was kind of long winded but I hope that helped!

[dailyanarchistposts]

A Green New Deal?

The ballot initiative is supported by an economic assessment from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts. It calls for large scale reductions in CO2 emissions of 20 million tons per year. By 2035, CO2 emissions would be 40 percent lower than they were in 2014.

Beyond this, the initiative would place a carbon-emissions fee on major polluters, and would use the billions of dollars in revenue collected for a series of investments in clean energy and water. The proposal would see that money directed to employers with a high-wage, labor-protection model. And significantly, money would be earmarked to be spent on the economic, environmental, and health-care restoration of those communities most negatively impacted and threatened by global climate change. Some examples of programs would include low-income energy-assistance programs and there would be job retraining and wage and benefit protections for workers in fossil-fuel-reliant industries over the course of a generation while those industries are phased out.

There will also be resources made available for Indigenous communities deeply feeling impacts of ecological crises and dealing with pressing impacts from climate change. As one example, the Quinault Indian Nation, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula coast, is seeing its historic burial grounds and sacred sites inundated with sea water rises. Portions of its ancestral lands around the coastal villages of Taholah and Queets are already becoming uninhabitable. If ballot initiative 1631 passes, there will be more resources and funds available to protect habitat and develop greater resilience.

Supporters are calling this a Green New Deal. The idea is to use money raised through the $15 per ton fee on CO2 emissions to create so-called glide paths to full retirement for workers in fossil fuel industries within five years of retiring. So, for workers who had worked in these industries for between one and five years, there would be a year of guaranteed income, health care, and retirement contributions for every year worked by that worker. Workers who had worked in the fossil fuel industry for more than five years would be covered with a wage insurance program for up to five years to make up for any income difference between their wages in the fossil fuel industry and the new wages in a non-fossil fuel industry. The aim is to have a just transition to new work rather than simply retraining.

The Western States Petroleum Association and conservative PACs are already lining up to throw millions behind a “No on 1631” campaign. So clearly some of them see some initial costs.

[probablyasocialecologist]

It is not just fossil fuels that must be dealt with—fast mitigation in rich countries also requires phasing out other globalized, profit-oriented, unsustainable industrial economic sectors that do not serve the common good, while at the same time improving and expanding activities that ensure human flourishing within ecological limits, such as all aspects of care, renewable energy sources, regenerative agriculture, low-carbon public transport, and so on. Economic coordination and planning are central to achieve this. Social activity that does not advance human well-being, such as “bullshit” and “batshit” jobs, the arms industry and the military, advertising, lobbying, planned obsolescence, fast fashion, border security, and large parts of the financial industry, will have to be scaled down. The same goes for any economic activity that cannot be restructured socioecologically, such as a large part of motorized individual transport (above all in cities), air transport, and globalized trade, as well as industrial agriculture and industrial animal farming. To ensure the affected workers (and communities) are at the center of this process, just transitions should involve processes of conversion of firms and industries, adequate retraining of workers, and early retirement schemes. Besides sector-specific arrangements, degrowth strives for a more just distribution of work at the societal level, including both commodified and uncommodified work. This will have to involve decided processes that consider the multiple existing inequities along the lines of gender, race and class, among others.

Matthias Schmelzer and Elena Hofferberth, Democratic Planning for Degrowth

[gayferrari]

Real talk though, I always feel a little bad for the younger nepo-siblings of really successful riders/drivers cause like, how are you ever supposed to measure up? Marini is a great example because it doesn’t matter how good he is or how far he runs, he will always be Valentino Rossis less successful baby brother, even if he won 9 championships (wich he just won’t) Vale would still have done it first, he’ll never be known just for being himself and that makes me a bit sad.

My perspective on this is different than yours, because I think athletes' siblings (far more than their kids) have a good POV of just how hard it is to make it as a competitive athlete, let alone in a major class. And the fact that they also made it there, imo, it's something worthwhile to take pride in. You both had great careers and your sibling had an astonishingly great one. I don't think having a legend in the family should undermine someone else's accomplishments to people who know the sport intimately (not fans. Luca will always be Vale's little brother to many fans but idc if he cares about that)

Like, I just think we look at Vale, who made his 9 championships almost look easy, and it's easy to forget just how many thousands of aspiring athletes are just never good enough to go pro, let alone in a major class. Most athletes can never hope to make a good living from their sport, you know? I think the kind of athletes who have the luxury to retire at 35 and not have to look into retraining into a second career just to pay their mortgage ARE the guys who have Made It. Every less successful nepo sibling who's competing in a main class HAS made it. Even if you'll always be somebody's little brother, I think your peers are well aware that no amount of sibling connection can make up for lacking the discipline and skills you need to succeed as an athlete.

I'm rambling a lot! But tldr I think actually just the fact of a set of siblings BOTH good enough to compete in a major level is an accomplishment in itself; sport isn't a career where you can just put any random guy with connections in a job and let them have at it unless they have some chops. So, for my point of view, if I went through years of training and saw so many of my peers wash out, and I was still there, I would be proud of my accomplishments. Even if my brother was the greatest ever I'd be too busy enjoying the perks AND being genuinely happy he's THAT good (disclaimer that I'm very close to my brother) rather than beat myself up over being good but not great. It's 100% my subjective opinion and I hope this makes sense, but every time I think about somebody's famous having middling athletes relatives I'm like "They ARE still athletes though! That takes so much work"

Anyway Luca is my #1 fave nepo relation ever. He's such a nice humble guy. I want to RPFy the fuck out of he and Vale in the fics, though, so I will reserve the right to ignore everything I just typed out and give them both 700 complexes to make the RPF interesting should the need arise :D

[tg-headcanons]

Two thoughts:

Does the ccg use dogs to sniff out ghouls? If they do, i almost imagine they would develope a specific, ghoul hunting breed - one with an excellent sense of smell but, unlike most hunting dogs, with no instinct to bite or attack their prey but rather to just find, follow, surround and hold in place (a bit like a rhodesian ridgeback, perhaps.) After all, the dog trying to attack the ghoul would absolutely not end well at all for the dog

And

I imagine some instruments must be more grating on ghoul ears then others - i.e. a piano, for example, will generally sound nice as long as it's in tune and so i imagine ghouls wouldn't have much of an averse reaction to that instrument, even if its a beginner playing. But say, for example, you have a beginner clarinet whose instrument squeaks and shrieks like a cat that just got its tail shredded — i cant imagine that would pair terribly well with their hearing

GHOUL HUNTING DOGS GHOUL HUNTING DOGS (IVE NEVER CONSIDERED THIS BEFORE BUT MY DOG DAYCARE EMPLOYEE ASS IS GOING WILD)

The practice of using dogs to search for ghouls is a very old one, but despite falling out of practice around the 1960s due to breed health problems and more effective methods being discovered, some of them are still around like other breeds no longer used for their original purpose

Arracht hounds are an old breed that split off from Bloodhounds. They were meant to track and hunt, but some had a behavioral quirk of howling and snarling at their prey rather than attacking, alerting humans of their location but quick to scare off animals and a liability to hunts. They were mostly deemed useless bloodhounds, until a small community in rural Ireland during the Middle Ages had one of their bloodhounds do this alert display at a seemingly normal human who was later discovered to be the monster preying on their village

The breed started to be cultivated for ghoul detection. They eventually ended up as tall, long legged and wrinkly animals bred to shriek and follow their marks, and trained to seek the smell of ghouls. Before the invention of better methods, these dogs were revolutionary and often the best detection system anyone could get. They were trained to stay out of a ghoul’s grasp to keep making as much noise as possible for as long as possible until humans could show up, and their wrinkly, loose skin made it easy for them to escape, better to lose a handful of skin than be killed

This obviously wasn’t a perfect system. A lot of those dogs, even the best bred and trained, didn’t survive their encounters. Others would find false positives and cause their attending humans to attack and kill other humans. Still, back then, an imperfect alarm was better than nothing. Many places in Europe became very dangerous for ghouls, and as those dogs spread through the world it only got worse for them

Eventually the dogs fell out of use. With better methods such as rc testing discovered they were no longer the most reliable source, and both human rights organizations citing the amount of innocent humans they got killed and animal rights groups citing how many of the dogs get killed, there was less and less reason to keep them on. The final straw was just how bad the breed got. Over time the breed developed issues the same as any other, but this one had a tendency to lose hearing and eyesight early and get neurotic and dangerous when working around ghouls for too long, so most ghoul extermination organizations retired the Arracht Hounds

Most of them are now housepets, some are trying to retrain them into guard or hunting dogs, and a few rural ghoul hunting organizations still use them, but for the most part they don’t work anymore. Every once and awhile there’s a headline of a ghoul getting caught when a family’s Arracht hound went wild over an inconspicuous neighbor, but that’s as far as it goes. People in cities are advised against getting them. They shriek very loud and maybe it’s all false positives, but you really don’t want to know just how many ghoul are around you

And as for the instruments: the ghoul hatred of squeaky clarinets and trumpets is visceral. They will actively avoid middle schools and music shops where kids are learning to play them

[track2hack]

05.03.2024

SHE’S ARRIVING TOMORROW!!!

I’ll stop edging y’all now and share the secret horse I’ve acquired 🫣

This is Molly! She’s a 6yo 163cm thoroughbred mare by Mongolian Khan out of an Iffraaj dam. She raced 12 times for 4 placings and retired off the track in 2022.

She’s been to a handful of shows and won Champion inhand hack and Reserve Champion ridden hack, been to pony club rallies, the beach, road hacks, and a super keen jumper!

First photo is the day she came off the track at the retrainer’s, other photos are from her owner!

And no, her star isn’t photoshopped, it really is like that in person 🥰🤩

[galexibrain]

We all love feral cat Vegeta but I propose retired racehorse Vegeta.

Off-track thoroughbreds are often high-strung and have only known one thing all their lives: run run run.

Now, if a racehorse is retired from racing it can obviously for health reasons, but also simply that they're too slow, or have earned enough money ... etc.

And if they're still healthy they're often retrained as riding horses, which can be a bit of a learning curve for them.

Often they're being turned out to pasture for a few months to decompress before their training starts.

And then they have to learn from scratch: carrying a rider, balancing them in a different saddle, in a different environment, and listening to different aids.

For some it is really hard to learn to gallop without racing off. It often takes a lot of patience and setbacks.

But if done right, ex-racers are often some of the best and most reliable riding horses you can have, that can do dressage, trailriding, showjumping etc. etc. whatever you want.

Can y'all see my vision

[skaldish]

I saw your post about being nice when you don't feel nice and I was wondering if you could expand on that. I have a relatively new (couple months) roommate who's been home for the last 5 days and I haven't gotten any alone time and it's driving me crazy because I'm used to having the house to myself most of the time. And I have to mask all the time around this roommate because they laugh at me and are in general really overstimulating. And I am falling back into maladaptive old habits and trying really hard not to hurt myself because that's the only way I know how to self regulate when I'm this overstimulated and I've been masking for the last five days straight and I feel like I'm about to fall apart. And my therapist retired recently enough I haven't found a new one and I haven't had a therapy session since december and I don't know what to do anymore

In my experience as an Autistic person, kindness is difficult if not impossible when you're in constant pain.

People typically think of "pain" as bodily aches, stings, and throbs—as something inflicted through your sense of touch. They may also throw "emotional pain" into the definition, but that's about it.

On top of those two things, I can also experience pain-inducing tastes, textures, smells, sights, and sounds. These pains are a different physiological experience, but the fact they distress and traumatize my brain exactly the same way is how I know it's pain as opposed to disapproval.

(I can also experience the kind of pain that comes with certain foods causinf indetectable inflamation in all my cells. Imagine living your life with your body in an iron maiden.)

Sensory overload causes pain. Rejection causes pain. And pain compromises how we interact with the world, including our ability to be pleasant with people. Pain makes us want to scream.

Your brain is engaging with old habits because it's trying to protect itself. This is biological adaptation at work, not a moral failing on your part. Your brain learned from past experiences that doing XYZ behavior can make this kind of pain stop. It takes a special kind of therapy to retrain these behavior patterns, as well as changing your environment so it's no longer painful, so don't blame yourself for not being able to brute-force it. We can't override our survival adaptations, only retrain them.

It can take a long time and a lot of trial and error, but it's worth it.

(These days I compromise for no one when it comes to my environment. My theory is that autistic people are built for living at night [and that our senses are probably what protected our species before we domesticated dogs, but that's an aside], so I tailor my environment to never be much louder than 4am. And this is just one example of what I do to reduce pain exposure.)

[mysteriouslytransparentwitch]

more personal

on this day of April 20, in new moon in aries, I learned that I could not do my training, because I need the agreement of my company. My company refuses. I also learned that my company is in a backup plan until September.

My wish is to leave the world of trade, trade in France is going badly, it is changing. I'm tired of boxes, numbers and customer contact.

I crave tranquility. I accepted that I will probably have 2 jobs at the same time because a single source of money is no longer sufficient in France. I even accept that I will never be an owner. Currently, conditions are extremely harsh in France. I hope to be able to start saving money for my retirement in 30 years.

Now I have to pray that there will be a redundancy plan, to get unemployment and to have help with professional retraining. The company is international.

This afternoon, I saw a friend of mine. She told me the updates of our circle of acquaintances, there was a marriage proposal and a new pregnancy. I felt moved but happy for these people. I felt moved because since my health problems deteriorated, I was able to take a step back from my life. I told myself it's really time to take your life in hand, and design the life I want. So, I take steps... then finally nothing... I feel emotional because I have the impression of stagnating since the age of 27 except that I will be 34 years old I have not built anything because there nothing that stays solid. I work on myself, I work with the help of a professional, I put words to ailments. But.......

I don't know if I have too much hope or too much expectation or it's me who has a psychological problem.

I think a lot about going to demonstrate on May 1st, Labor Day in Paris, because we live in a society where I feel bad or I can't find my place, because the government does not understand new aspirations. Desires for radical changes.

I try to hang on to my personal advancements, I use this quiet time (I'm in half-time therapy until July 7) to meet people I know around their passion. I was able to discover poker, modern art, this Saturday I'm going to discover curling, next week ancient Egypt.

it was a more personal message that always makes me feel so good.

[dracaeons]

realized i haven't really fleshed out a post-dai worldstate for ellas yet. i think she kind of functionally retires for a little bit in order to retrain and recover from the events of trespasser. by the time datv rolls around she's a single-wield rogue still focusing on her assassin (i.e.: crow) and shadow techniques. she does not use a prosthetic and she's going to tear into the fade and scramble solas with chives. she winds up at the lighthouse after making contact with rook and the gang (probably via some kind of crowfrontation with lucanis or a crow rook but that's tbc and really rp-flexible!). she probably knows of davrin if not knowing him directly.

[dragonmuse]

(In light of Ao3 being down I am posting the first chunk of a new fic that will eventually go up as a one shot. It’s a Lucius/Izzy modern au featuring non traditional student Izzy.)

The backroom of Jackie’s bar was startlingly quiet. Izzy was fairly sure she’d installed soundproofing at some point for her own reasons and he was steadfastly not asking about those reasons. What it meant, as far as he was concerned, was that he could sip pretty decent whiskey for free while he fixed her inevitably bookkeeping problems once a month without hearing the general cacophony of the front room

:readmore:

Her arrival was heralded by the sharp smell of cigar smoke,

“Find it yet?”

“Yeah,” he held a receipt out that was very wrinkled and had a mysterious brown crust stuck to the bottom. “Danny has been buying all your limes from the grocery store instead of the bulk order.”

“Why?”

She sat down beside him at the long table she used in lieu of a desk. It had a lot of nicks, scars and graffiti scrawled on it. Too many years being handled by too many careless people.

Izzy could relate.

“I don’t ask for reasons, just hunt down the money. You’ll have retrain him on the ordering system.”

“I’ll get Geraldo to do it,” she waved that away. “He and Danny get each other.”

One empty headed fool to another, that checked out.

“Organized the receipts, should be ready for the taxman next month,” he told her instead of risking his neck saying that out loud.

“Thank fuck. Honestly, Hands, why don’t you just get certified already and then I can just pay you proper to do the taxes and things. Make my life a fuckload easier.”

“And you know I do everything for your convenience,” he rolled his eyes.

“Maybe you should. What the fuck else are you doing?”

Izzy picked up his whiskey and took a long sip.

He had this waking nightmare, an anxiety dream that played on loop in his head while he stared sightlessly at his walls at the apartment. In it, he’s walking down a sidewalk with no where in particular to go. He sees Eddy across the street. She spots him and before he can hide, she’s waving, cheerful as anything. She looks happy, full of good news and good things that have happened since he was unceremoniously ejected from his life.

The worst part of it is that after telling him about every good thing, including every detail of Bonnet’s ass-ugly mansion and collection of gold appliances, she asks him sincerely,

“So what’ve you been up to?”

And Izzy will have to say ‘nothing’.

He doesn’t really need to work. The jobs they ran may have been questionable in their legality, but they’d paid in real money. If he lived frugally, he could be retired for all his days and he’d never really wanted for much. But he didn’t have hobbies, never had time to cultivate any, didn’t have any old friends to spend time with, most of them were dead or in jail or had taken Eddy’s side when things ended, and he wasn’t in the market for new friends which seemed complicated and kind of nauseating.

He’d spent the last six months fixing Jackie’s books because she’d never much liked Eddy and had always been his friend alone (and lonely in that job) and trying to get the feral tomcat that lived in the alley next to his brownstone to get close enough that he could nab it and have someone castrate the damn thing so it’d stop caterwauling at all hours of the night.

“You need a degree,” he said into his whiskey. “To get certified.”

“Didn’t you go to college?”

“Dropped out after two years. Started the business instead.”

“Bet they’d still take the credits,” she shrugged. “Throw in some ‘life experience’.

“Yeah,” he scoffed. “Tell them I graduated from the school of hardknocks.”

Bonnet was a professor of something, he was pretty sure. He’d had a lot of books and talked about classes anyway. English, maybe? That sounded right. Eddy had liked how he spoke.

“Should be worth something to someone,” Jackie’s cigar smoke curled out of the corners of her mouth. “Can you imagine? I’d already have a degree in business if they took it out in years in.”

“And in matrimony,” he raised his glass to her and she laughed, fortunately. In a good mood.

“A full on masters in missus,” she grinned and he chuckled, the first time he’d even come close to a laugh in sometime.

Izzy walked home not much later. She’d stuck a cigar in his jacket pocket on his way out with a wink, so instead of going all the way inside, he sat down on his stoop and lit it. It was a mild summer night and he hadn’t actually sat out here in some time. It was a good cigar, but mostly it just made him miss cigarettes. He’d given them up fifteen years ago and sometimes he still craved the taste.

Mostly he craved how it had tasted bleeding into him through Eddy’s lips, but that wasn’t worth thinking about. Think about how the smoke reached for the cloudy night sky. Think about the warm air on his face. Think about how grocery shopping, meal planning, laundry, all the things that life required to keep the wheels rolling forward.

The tomcat padded up to the stoop, just out of reach. He was a big fellow, orange as anything with a ragged ear and proud bearing.

“You’re a son of a bitch,” he told the cat, even as he reached into his coat and pulled out the treats he’d started keeping on him as a bribe. He placed one on the bottom step then returned to his spot at the top.

The cat could clearly smell it, nose going and tail lashing, but he didn’t move from his spot until Izzy got up and opened the front door. Even then, he just darted in, nabbed the treat then ran off back into the alley. Figured.

He watched the news, barely taking it in. Went to bed and didn’t sleep.

In the wee hours, he got his laptop and opened up a website.

***

“Annnnd there we go!” His advisor beamed at him. The guy was maybe twenty-five and he said ‘nontraditional student’ like he meant ‘geriatric dumbass’. Izzy had had to draw on every minute of his ancient court-mandated anger management class tips to keep quiet.

“Yes,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “I know how to get into the system. Got myself set for the next semester, but I’m closed out of anything that satisfies the arts requirement.”

“Ooooh!” His advisor blinked wetly at him. “Why didn’t you just say that?”

Breath in. Breath out. I don’t want to go to prison, I don’t want to go to prison, I don’t want to go to prison. It probably wasn’t what Cindy, his anger management trainer, had meant by a mantra, but it had done him a lot of good over the years.

“What can I take that’s still open?” He said through only slightly gritted teeth and, more remarkably, without swearing.

“Let’s see! Ooooh there’s ceramics!” He said after some clicking. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”

I don’t want to go to prison. I don’t want to go to prison.

“No.”

“It can be very therapeutic, my Nana loves making pots.”

I don’t want to go to prison. I don’t want to go to prison.

“What else is there?”

“Uh...closed...closed...” The bright smile started to dim a little. “Closed...wow, the arts are popular...mmm. There’s Drawing 1 still open. Do you want to learn how to draw?”

“Is quartering involved?” he muttered.

“Hm?”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Great!”

Which was how Izzy found himself walking into an airy room filled with color-splotched surfaces, and the smell of paint hanging in the air. There were a few students milling around already, settling in front of easels. Some of them were chatting with each other or fussing over their supplies.

In the first semester, Izzy had attempted to gravitate toward the back as he would’ve with Ed back in the day, but quickly it became apparent that he needed to be closer to the front to read the slides and it was easier to pay attention that way anyway. If he wanted privacy, the front tended to be better for that anyway. No one wanted the very front. He usually had the entire space to himself.

Here it meant that everyone behind him would probably be able to see his work, but what the hell did he care about a bunch of kids knowing he couldn’t draw worth a damn? He just needed to get this class out from under him so he could fill his schedule with math and some of the engineering courses that he could begrudgingly acknowledge sounded interesting.

So up front it was. He set down the required sketchbook and pencils, tossed his much battered leather jacket over the back of the seat, set his travel mug to one side (just water, but he preferred it as cold as possible for as long as possible) and settled in with the expectation of suffering.

One of the students was buzzing around at the front of the class, clicking around on a laptop and then moving to shuffle papers. He was tall and dark-haired, dressed exactly like Izzy imagined a flighty art major would be: fashionably loose striped shirt, wide legged pants and a ridiculous silky bit of material tied around his throat. He was wearing an actual watch though which was unusual. The kids around Izzy seemed to either rely on their phones, smart watches or just not know what the hell time it was at any given moment.

“Hi,” the maybe-a-T.A. chirped right at him. “Thanks for sitting up front. I start to worry that I smell the way people avoid it.”

“I like to actually see shit,” Izzy shrugged.

“Important in any class, but doubly important in this one.”

“Think there’s a lot of powerpoint?” He asked, resigned.

“Nah,” the guy smiled brightly. “Why do you ask?”

“Something about the words on the screen gives me a headache.

Izzy waited for a comment about his age which seemed to be everyone’s go-to conversational topic, but the guy just nodded.

“Everyone needs a screen break sometimes. One of my friends uses these blue tinted glasses or something, swears by them to help screen headaches for what it’s worth.”

Before Izzy could ask a follow up question, a student ambled up to maybe-a-T.A.asking something about paper weights that Izzy didn’t care to follow. He checked his email on his phone, and then googled ‘blue tinted glasses’ they looked ugly as fuck.

“Okay!” maybe-a-T.A. said from the front of the class. “Nice to see a few familiar faces, but most of you are new to me. I’m Dr. Lucius Spriggs, welcome to Drawing 101. If this isn’t where you’re supposed to be, take the opportunity to find the exits located at the back of the room.”

Izzy closed his eyes for a second. This kid was the fucking professor. He had been fortunate enough in the first semester to at least be in the same age range (even once notably younger) than the teachers.

Maybe they handed out art degrees faster than ones in accounting. Izzy re-opened his eyes and accepted his fate. At least the syllabus made sense, set up practically as Dr. Spriggs went over it. He sat on the edge of a table as he did so, legs outstretched and crossed at the ankle.

“So that’s the boring stuff,” Dr. Spriggs tossed his copy of the syllabus over his shoulder with an impish smile. “Here’s the important thing. Art is all about creativity and experimentation and I love all that. I encourage it in any of your free drawing assignments, but here and now, in this class, my job is to teach you some fundamentals. That means I’m going to give you bowls of fruit and all that jazz and I want you to draw bowls of fruit. You can’t experiment until you know what you’re experimenting with.”

Izzy sat up a little straighter. That seemed remarkably straight forward.

“Art isn’t just making beautiful things,” he went on. “It takes dedication and practice like anything in your life you want to be good at. This class focuses on that part of it for your benefit. You know all that stuff about learning outcomes? That matters to me. I want you to leave knowing you can draw....yes?”

A girl timidly put her hand back down, “What if we can’t? I’ve never been able to draw anything before.”

“Then I get to look particularly impressive,” he said with a grin. “You will draw something before you leave my class, okay? But only if you put the effort in. Promise?”

She nodded shyly, pinking up. Izzy’s initial hopefulness faded. He was going to die of boredom or of triteness here.

“Cool. Okay, we’re going to do attendance to make sure everyone is actually in the right place and so I can put faces to all your names. If I get the pronunciation wrong, please correct me. If your pronouns aren’t in the system or recently changed, let me know either during roll or shoot me an email if you’d prefer.”

And then it was the tedious listing off. When Dr. Spriggs said, “Israel Hands?” He just lifted his hand enough to be acknowledged.

He assumed that be it for today. Most of the professors seemed to prefer their setup classes to be short and sweet, but Dr. Spriggs put down his laptop and picked up a pencil.

“So for today, we’re going to start out humble. Let’s talk sitting and saving our wrists.”

Izzy hadn’t thought about his posture in a long time and how he held a pencil hadn’t been a conscious thought since kindergarten. It felt good to stretch a little though and then Dr. Spriggs went around the room as the made lines on an initial sheet of paper to guide them a little more.

“Oh, good,” Dr. Spriggs stopped by him last on his way back up to the front. “You’ve got a good natural hand position, but you can turn your paper to get a good angle instead of your wrist.”

Izzy frowned, but adjusted his page. “Yeah?”

“Great! Israel, right?”

“Izzy,” he corrected absently. Moving the paper was easier. Huh.

“Izzy,” Dr. Spriggs repeated. “Did you use a ruler?”

“No?”

“Wow,” the laugh was gentle. “You’ve got a good eye and a steady hand.”

The compliment landed like a worm in his gut, squirming and wriggling uncomfortably.

“Thanks,” he muttered and almost hunched his shoulders, catching himself at the last second. Thankfully, the professor moved back to the front of the room and started wrapping up, talking about their first assignment.

He escaped without further incident.

The tomcat didn’t show up when he sat on the stoop that night. He’d taken to doing that more, even as it got colder. Sometimes the cat would sit just a few steps beneath him now, waiting patiently for the mouthfuls that Izzy would provide.

Alone, he went through the homework for what the school called ‘Corporate Finance’ and Izzy had already mentally dubbed ‘Rich Fuckers Get Richer’’ class. Jackie would love it. It was now how he pictured himself at fifty, sitting on the stoop like his father used to, chewing on straw instead of smoking, doing homework like he was the obedient teenager that he’d never been.

Then again, he’d pictured himself in a grave at fifty for most of this life, so what the fuck did he know? This was probably better than that.